NYPD officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio, booing him at a graduation ceremony and charging that he is complicit in the shooting deaths of two city cops make Gotham look bad. But the animosity has much to do with union contracts and the re-election of the police union president.
“The heated police rhetoric has more to do with the stalled labor contract negotiations and the upcoming PBA union elections than any mayoral comments or police reform plans,” explained Marq Claxton, director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, to the AmNews. “With that being said, the police protestors not only turned their backs on the mayor, but they gave a symbolic middle finger to the calls for reform. They disrespected the memory of their fallen colleague, and they drew a clear line in the sand against the any talk or plans of a paradigm shift in police-community relations.”
De Blasio may not be the first mayor of New York City to clash with the NYPD, but his struggle for the soul of the five boroughs could be one for the record books.
According to recent reports, on the day that NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated while sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn, a memo allegedly sent by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called for a slowdown of arrests unless officers didn’t have a choice.
“Absolutely NO enforcement action in the form of arrests and/or summonses is to be taken unless absolutely necessary,” read the memo. PBA President Pat Lynch denied that the memo was sent by the PBA, but the rhetoric expressed within the memo isn’t much different from what Lynch himself has said since the “Black Lives Matter” protests have taken over much of New York City.
In the immediate aftermath of the Ramos and Liu shooting, Lynch declared that de Blasio had “blood on his hands.” Other conservative politicians took a similar stance, including former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who criticized not only de Blasio, but also the protesters, the Rev. Al Sharpton, President Barack Obama and soon to be former Attorney General Eric Holder. In 1992, mayoral candidate Giuliani led a violent police riot at City Hall against then Mayor David Dinkins.
This week, the New York Post continued to report on the alleged arrest slowdown by NYPD officers, stating that arrests in the five boroughs are down 66 percent, starting the week of Dec. 22, compared with the same period last year. Part of the decline in arrests can be traced to officers focusing less on low-level, petty crimes. However, there is a noticeable absence of patrolling officers in some stretches of the Bed-Stuy neighborhood where Ramos and Liu were gunned down.
At Ramos’ funeral, officers turned their backs on de Blasio, continuing the practice that started when the mayor went to visit the families of Ramos and Liu at Woodhull Medical Center. The demonstrators included Lynch and Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins.
The New York Times has compared the recent actions by police to the behavior of petulant children not getting what they want all the time. National Latino Officers Association President Anthony Miranda told the AmNews that although he has issues with de Blasio’s mayoral style, he’s not entirely happy with the behavior of the disrespectful officers, either.
When asked if this clash with the mayor was different from past police clashes with mayors, Miranda said, “This is definitely different than the other clashes, because there had not been the assassination of two officers. It kind of changes the dynamic here. But I don’t think the mayor has anything to apologize for. He especially doesn’t have to apologize for talking about his son. That’s a reality faced by most people of color, and the people who don’t want to hear it are the ones with a problem.
“The people who should apologize are the unions who allowed this to happen at the funeral and at the hospital. It’s a complete disrespect to the officers and disrespect to their families.”
Even though Miranda felt de Blasio had nothing to apologize for in that regard, he did criticize the mayor for not showing strength in his leadership and only responding to public embarrassment.
Miranda is also a member of the Campaign for Fair Latino Representation. Concerning the lack of Latino representation in de Blasio’s administration, he said, “We’ve been calling for meetings with de Blasio for some time now. Maybe we haven’t embarrassed him enough, like the [police] unions did, to warrant a meeting.”
Tuesday, the police unions met with de Blasio in a closed meeting to try and ease the tensions.
“I would hope he would come from a better position of strength, where he tells them, ‘I’m your mayor and this is what I want,’” said Miranda. “That would be the appropriate tone for this kind of meeting. The only voice heard across the country from New York was Pat Lynch. It made it seem like he was in charge of the police and not the commissioner.”
Miranda also talked about the lack of Latino representation in top positions within the NYPD. He said that the mayor lost control of the city by letting offshoots protest, such as the one chanting for dead cops, happen on his watch, but he agreed with protesters’ right to demonstrate, as long as it didn’t infringe on the rights of other citizens.
Despite major rumblings in communities of color demanding that Lynch and his insubordinate cohorts be disciplined, both Bratton and de Blasio seem to be taking a more passive approach.
“The world witnessed police officers turning their backs at a funeral of one of their fallen comrades when the mayor of the city, who was invited by the family of the fallen officer, spoke,” said an angry Damon K. Jones, the New York representative of Blacks in Law Enforcement of America. “To turn your back on someone or something is to refuse to help or assist. What message are union leaders like PBA President Pat Lynch sending to the taxpayers of the city by instructing his members to turn their backs on the office of the mayor that de Blasio was elected to by a democratic process, which is a right that every American holds dear?”
Jones continued, “What is most disturbing is seeing Black police officers joining in the buffoonery and side-show of PBA President Pat Lynch and other police leaders that joined in on the ‘back turning.’ When Mr. Lynch decided that the mayor didn’t support officers of the NYPD, the mayor was being honest of his concerns of his own Black son having encounters with police. Mayor de Blasio’s concerns are the same concerns of millions of Black, Brown and even white families that believe in a just and accountable policing system.”
Jones further berated Black officers who took part in the action. He declared, “Black police officers turned their backs, they are in fact turning their backs on the Black community as well!” He said that Black officers understand that on “any given day [they or their] family member could be a victim of the same issues that the protesters are protesting about throughout the country.”
Jones stated that by joining in the protest by Lynch, Black police officers have become covert cowards. “You have nodded and winked at institutional policies, practices and patterns of behavior that disproportionately inflicted misery in your birth communities,” he charged. “It will become impossible for Black police officers to tell the truth in your homes after lying all day on your jobs.”
Jones questioned whether these same Black officers consider some of their own complaints of “being racially profiled while off-duty by those who you stand with your back turned.” Do they recall “the over 20 incidences of Black cops being shot, shot at or killed in New York by their white counterparts, and the incident has never happened in the reverse?”
Jones quotes former Gov. David Paterson’s “Police on Police Shooting Task Force,” which concluded that “racial bias” plays a role in an officer’s decision to use deadly force on a subject.
Bringing in the union aspect, Jones, a state corrections officer from Westchester County, challenged, “As dues paying members of NYPD PBA, Black police officers should ask PBA President Pat Lynch and other police leaders that support his stance what solutions have they brought to the table to make sure that these issues are being resolved.”
He concluded, “Black police officers should no longer permit yourself to be relegated to the role of brutal pawns in a chess game of those like PBA President Pat Lynch and others while affecting the communities in which we serve.”
Robert Gangi of the Police Reform Organizing Project spoke on Tuesday’s meeting between de Blasio and the police unions. While it was being hailed as the first step in the healing process, PROP determined, “No meaningful and lasting healing can take place in our city—which is an outcome we all seek—without including the voices of active and responsible police reformers and without instituting changes in everyday police practices that currently target low-income people of color for engaging in low-level infractions. This harassment is not a matter of our opinion, but supported by the NYPD’s own data: 85 to 95 percent of the people arrested or ticketed for misdemeanors and other petty infractions in New York City are African-American or Latino. The fundamental changes needed to correct the NYPD’s unjust and biased practices are to abandon ‘Broken Windows’ policing and to abolish the department’s current quota system for evaluating officers’ performance.”
Gangi and PROP agree that de Blasio should not apologize for his comments about the need that he has felt to warn his teenage son about the dangers inherent in his interactions with police officers. “No Black or Brown parent living in New York City that we at PROP have spoken with—over the last several years—has not recounted the same concerns about the safety of their children, especially their sons, and how that safety is at risk in encounters with police officers,” said Gangi. “White parents in our city do not have these fears, and that’s a tale of two cities no New Yorker should accept.”
Lynch, in a statement on the PBA’s website, expressed his thanks to the many thousands of law enforcement officers from outside of New York who attended Ramos’ funeral and donated to both his and Liu’s families.
“The acts of kindness, both small and grand, and the appreciation from those that we risk our lives to protect is a clear indication that the lives and deaths of police officers Ramos and Liu had and will have great meaning,” concluded Lynch’s statement. When comparing this gentle statement to his previous public statements, one wonders why he resorted to such vitriol earlier?
